Our Family

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

A Totally Awesome Vacation - Part I

We took the most amazing vacation as a family in January. I've been horrible at keeping up with my blogging lately, but I need to get this on here before I forget any of the amazing details. So here goes.

We drove to Florida. We did our routine drive-through-the-night thing on the way there. So we stopped at McDonald's for a late dinner right before the kids had to go to "bed."

We had to get a picture taken with Ronald, of course.

Then we got back into the car and got ready for a night of sleep. Except Kendall, who of course had a long night ahead of him! The kids actually really love traveling like this. They look forward to sleeping in the car with their pillow pets and blankets. We get out glow sticks once it is completely dark and play with those for a few minutes, read scriptures and then try to get everyone to stop talking.

The drive was pretty uneventful, we had nice weather and didn't have to stop too many times. We were surprised at how cold it was all the way down. We figured it would keep getting warmer and warmer, but it really didn't warm up much until we hit Florida. We made it there in less time than we planned, so we immediately found a public beach that we could play on. It was empty, since the locals think it's cold in January. Everyone was excited to put on their sunglasses.

We found the ocean!

They ran up and down the beach, trying to get as close to the waves as possible without getting wet!

Oops. A little too close.

There were tons and tons of shells on this beach. In fact, the sand wasn't very soft. It was really more like small shards of shells.

But we did find one area of very soft sand to play in.

Chasing seagulls was the second favorite thing to do. And we heard the phrase "THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!!!" over and over again.

Next we met my parents at Marine Land Dolphin Adventures. My pictures are terrible here because I had sea spray on my filter over the lens and nothing to clean it with. Grr. I didn't know. Oh well. It was really fun to watch the dolphins. We thought about letting Avri feed them, but we would have had to wait around for 2 hours, so we decided to skip that.

In addition to dolphins they had a small aquarium section with a bunch of other marine life. We saw an octopus, sting rays, other large fish, sea stars, etc.

After that we finished our drive down the state to the hotel near Orlando. We stayed there for two nights. It wasn't a fantastic hotel, but it was decent and we got it free, so we couldn't complain too much. Here's Rigdon by the palm trees next to the hot tub. The pool was SOOOOO cold that it was like a double dog dare game trying to get people to get in. We had some good laughs.